Name: I Choose You: Empower Legal Teams with Automation
Uploaded: 2025-03-26T18:30:03.672Z
Duration: 1 h 29 min 36 s
Description: I Choose You: Empower Legal Teams with Automation

Transcript for "I Choose You: Empower Legal Teams with Automation": Hey, everybody, and welcome to an extremely exciting webinar that we have put together where we are gonna talk about empower your team leveraging legal automation. I'm Jordan. I'm with Formstack on our partner team, and I'm extremely excited to introduce Ali and Zach. Zach, I'll have you go first, and then we'll move to Ali and let you all introduce yourselves. Thanks, Jordan. Hi. I'm Zach, and I am the legal operations administrator at the Pokemon Company International or TPCI as we may refer to it here. I've been with the company about five or six years now after a couple, private practice and in house tents around the Seattle area, and, really looking forward to having the discussion with these folks today about how we're using technology to, deliver world class legal support. Awesome. And Ali? Hi, everyone. I'm Ali. I'm with LawVu, and I'm on our partnerships team. So I work closely with partners like Formstack, and some of our other partners to provide legal tech solutions to our customers. Yeah. Fantastic. And so the first thing we're gonna do for everybody here is we're gonna actually kick off with Ali for a LawVue demo. We wanna kinda set the scene of, you know, what tools are we using here. And then afterwards, we'll start digging into the practical applications. So, Ali, I'll hand the mic over to you for a demo, and then we can take it from there. Perfect. Let me share my screen. It's always fun. No matter where we are, the share screen button moves around at different points. Can can you see my screen? We got it. Yeah. You can see you can see the LawVu homepage? Yes. We have the AMC Inc business portal. Wonderful. Okay. I've got multiple multiple tabs up here. So so a brief intro introduction on LawVu. So LawVu is a legal workspace for in house legal teams. So we're built for corporate legal corporate or government legal teams, globally. We operate globally, and we're a place where you can come as a legal team to manage your your intake, so how you receive requests into the legal team, your matters. So once you have a request, how are you gonna manage that and who's gonna work on it? Your contracts. So we manage, contracts. We have, I guess, I call it a CLM, your spend. And so so how you're invoicing your, your law firm law firm partners and also reporting. So while you're doing all this work in Lawview, we're collecting data that you can use to report and provide insights back to your business on how you're working and what you're doing. So a lot of our customers come to us because they want to be more efficient. They want to streamline how they're working. And one of the places that they typically start is streamlining contract creation. So enabling their partners in the wider business and the sales team or the executive team or, beyond that to create contracts more quickly and reduce the turnaround time to getting those contracts created and back in front of the counterparties. So I'm just gonna, today, give you a very brief demo of how you would use as a legal team, how would you would use LawVu to streamline that contract creation process, using using LawVu and Formstack as well on the back end. So this is our business portal. This is where the legal team would interact with the wider business. We also have integrations with the usual productivity tools like Teams, Slack, Outlook, Gmail. So you could meet the business where they are and collect all of those incoming intake requests through through those tools. But this is this is the landing page, and so you could provide this page to the business, and they could use this to submit request in. This is entirely configurable. So if as a legal team, you can't you had the the most voluminous requests for contract review, you could make that front and center. But you could also put a whole lot of knowledge on here so that you're enabling that your your, sales team to self serve on some things. But today, I'm gonna show you how you would create a nondisclosure agreement from the business portal. So I can click in here, and I can use this link, and it will just automatically create a contract. So if I'm on the sales team, I can click add by wizard, and I can provide a few details, like the the name. I can pick a region, for example, a department. I can provide an address. I can pick an effective date that I want that contract to become effective, and I can then pick the other other party. So in doing this as the legal team, I force that salesperson to enter in some critical information. And then when I click next, it will create a contract record, and that will generate the contract document, and it will create a record for the legal team in in their in their law of your legal workspace so that they have the contract. They have the details filled out, and they have the information on it. And that kicks off a whole lot of reporting on our end. So they're tracking the date that contract was created. They're tracking all the details of the counterparty, and they can then track the turnaround time so that the data was started and the the data will be executed. So if I switch over into the view of a a legal user and I refresh, you can see that from the perspective of a legal a legal user on the in house legal team, I now have that contract in my CLM. I can open it. I can see who created it. I can see the date it was created, and I have the contract document already generated. And I haven't had to do anything for that because it's been automatically filled out by by Formstack's technology, which is integrated into LawVu. The last thing I'll show you is the reporting. So if I switch over into the reporting, you can see that using more view, you can generate you can collect and get insight into the type of work your the type of work your team's doing and how long it's taking. For example, I can see how many NDAs I have in the system as opposed to sales agreements. I can see what stage they're in. So are the majority of my agreements in in draft or are they executed or are they stuck in approvals? I can see the date, so I can see when when the contracts were created, the status over time. And if I scroll down a bit further, I can see the turnaround time. So I can track how many days it's taking me to turn around each of each of the contracts. And and I can break that down into the the types too. So I can see, here that, like, property agreements or employment agreements are taking a far longer time or they're spending a far longer time in draft than than other types of agreements. So you get that really rich reporting that that you can then use to to find out where you want to focus your efforts. Cool. I will stop sharing now. Awesome. That was perfect. I really appreciate you kind of, like, walking through it and showing how LawVu and Formstack work together to really create that kind of, like, automation magic. And kind of this step two, what we really wanna do, and, Zach, why you're gonna be the real star of the show here, is we wanna kind of bring it to a demo into a how does this practically work in the real world. And so, Zach, I'd love to start with kind of early days, or, you know, before LawVu and Formstack. What did your all's, like, legal process look like? And if you can just kinda, like, set the scenes of how things looked before, we kind of jumped in here with the solution. Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Ali, for the demo and Jordan for teeing me up. So, prior prior to a lot of you Formstack, like many in house legal departments, I'm sure our our process was much more manual. And contract requests could come in in many different forms through a variety of different channels. So could be email, Slack, a conversation in the hallway, you know, and the, the information that you were receiving as as along with that contract request, it could vary in terms of, you know, do does legal really have everything they need to start the work, or do we require follow ups? And each one of those is an additional cycle that just adds to the the total end to end time. So, we we ended up going with LawVu because, although the the context of this webinar is is mainly contracts focused, It's it is truly an enterprise legal management platform that also includes matter management and legal service provider management. So we we when we started looking for our the the well, we we ultimately selected LawVu, initially, it was just a new CLM or contract life cycle management system. But, once once we saw the benefits of LawVu, we we ended up deciding the more holistic approach was gonna suit us better for the long term. But but to get back to contracts, so as I was saying, we have all these different channels. It's really, really difficult to manage your workload when you're tracking information that's coming in from all these these different, these different channels. And then, even after you've, you know, completed the the task or the request, it's really difficult to to go back and and look back at, you know, what what did we do in that certain situation. Or I know we have a contract, but I can't find it. Or, you know, maybe there's some communication around it, and it's all just sort of tucked away in these different silos that, that just really spends the spends people's wheels and creates this big administrative burden to go to go track information down. So fast forward to today, I I think one of the biggest wins is that we've been able to centralize all of that work, and we've distilled it down to at the the very base level for our, business teams that we support. If you need legal support, just go to LawVu, and the system has automate automation in place that's going to put you on the right path. It's gonna put you in contact with the right people, and you don't have to keep track of who supports what or what the process is. As long as you're able to get into the system, you'll be you'll be taken care of. So so that's been that's been really great. And even though we have process documentation and training and we, you know, did did a whole, you know, change management project with the rollout. What we found was the system just on its own is so intuitive that people were able to figure it out organically. Just as long as they were able to to make it to the system, it kind of a lot of it took care of itself. So, for us, on on the back end, that's where all all the magic is with our automation in terms of, triage and then more recently with, with Formstack, triage plus contract template generation. So so that's kinda where we are today, and I I think a little later on there we'll get into some numbers. But Yeah. What what what this has done for our legal team is it's eliminated, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of emails, Slacks, just, all these little things that that over time really add up over the course of a year. And then for our business teams, they have a really easy place to go submit their requests. So, I think I think on both, you know, within the department and then with, you know, externally with the teams we support, folks are are really enjoying what we're what we've been working on lately. Yeah. That's perfect. And to, like, rewind a little bit, you said something that I thought was, like, a really good just, like, visualization. You were kinda talking about, like, these requests coming from all these different channels, kinda all coming into you from different directions. Would it be fair to kinda say I almost kinda creating a little bit of a bottleneck that, like, kind of everything was going to you, bottlenecked it out, and then it was a little bit of an administrative nightmare to just kinda continue that process? Would that be kind of a fair quick summarization of kind of the the the early stages? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And so with painting that picture of kinda, like, what what the process was at The Pokémon Company International, Ali, is that a pretty similar story to what you hear from, like, other folks as well or kinda when folks come to LawVu? Is that a very similar story that you hear? You know, Jordan, like, contracts is the one thing that every legal team deals with globally. Right? You might as a legal team, it it depends on what sort of business you're in, and where you operate and stuff. But contracts, you're all every legal team is gonna have to deal with contracts. And it's a huge bottleneck, to your point. It is a huge bottleneck. And we found and we we find with a lot of our customers that contracts is a really great place to start or automating the the generation of standard contracts is a great place to start to get really easy quick wins, because there's a lot of just manual and low value work that goes into maintaining, for example, a word template on a hard drive somewhere, or maybe you've storing it on, like, on your local machine. The salesperson wants an NDA. You have to go into that template. You have to go back and forth to get the details. You create it, and you send it to them. And then you have to go into your system and enter in, sometimes into a spreadsheet, the details of of what you sent out and where it's gone. And that stuff is just not what lawyers were trying to do. So for us, we advise all of our customers, start with the easy stuff, start with the low hanging fruit, and often that as contracts, your own internal contracts just making that template generation and, management easier and more streamlined. That's perfect. Yeah. We it's, I don't know if it's considered jargon at this point, but that crawl, walk, run, metaphor always always works, and that's that's amazing that, like, contracts always do seem to be that perfect place to start the crawl. And as we go through, you know, Zach, you gave us a little bit of a a taste on it with the with the last answer. But, you know, you all kind of looked at that process and said, we can do something about this. You know, there is a better way. There has to be a better way and, you know, enter Formstack and LawVu. And as Ali showed in that demo, kind of how LawVu and Formstack as a pair can really kind of streamline this process. So if you could just quickly revisit again, like, post launch, what does the product or what does the process look like now? Sure. Today, about 90% of all of our NDA requests that we received from all the different teams around the company, which adds up to several hundred, if not, you know, a few thousand a year. 90 plus percent are, initiated and fulfilled using, the contract wizard process as opposed to by upload. And we've we've been able to cut our end to end time down from, you know, could be two weeks down to just a couple days. And and I think we've we can go even further. I think I think, with Insights Connect and a couple other automation ideas we have, we'll be able to get it down to, a point in time where for certain NDAs, legal will never need to touch any part of the process. So so that that's been huge. You know, it as as as you both have mentioned, it for us, it's it's all about, how do we get people time back to focus on that, you know, the real strategic high impact work and and out of the kind of low complexity, high volume work. And then so we NDAs, that was that was the simplest place to start. We then expanded to our, our master services agreement and our SAU template. And so those we we've launched those a little bit later. And, about 30% of our overall MSA and SAU kinda commercial contract, those are now going through the wizard process. And, it's only been a couple months, but the data is supporting that, we're seeing typically, people can expect, about a 20% reduction in the end to end time if the contract wizard is the the starting point for the request as opposed to the, you know, going through the upload method. That's incredible. So, I mean, yeah, the operational efficiencies, like, you I mean, the numbers speak for themselves in that, aspect. And then, also, she said that, you know, in the future, kind of what this might look like is, you know, doesn't even have to be touched by the legal department. So, like, an incredible efficiency there. And I gotta imagine that really empowers your kind of team members who are starting this process off to really just kinda, like, own their own process and kind of, like, run at the speed that they need to. And so Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. K. Heck yeah. And then, Ali, so kind of looking back from, like, a LawVu lens, how does law views fit with other companies that are looking for those kinda, like, those same wins? So, you know, if we boil it all down to, like, empowering the employees and creating those legal operational efficiencies, can you talk a little bit from, like, your LawVu lens of, like, how that works with others? Yeah. Of course. So so we're firstly, we're entirely configurable, and so it's sort of a choose your own adventure type situation. Right? So legal teams, for example, like Zach's team, if they want to really turn that legal team into the center of enablement rather than the center of excellence, and enable the enable the wider team to fully self serve, we can set that up for them. There's other teams out there who still want to retain some sort of, like, management or control over the process, and we can also we can also cater to that so that, for example, legal has to approve before it goes out so we can change permissions so that they, the sales team or the wider business has the ability to to create a contract, but legal needs to review it first. So so we can do that. But consistently across, all our customers, what we're trying to do really is, to Zach's point, is we're trying to automate the real low value, high volume, low complexity tasks so so that, the team can focus on higher value strategic work. And a lot of those tasks look like things like entering data into a CLM. No one wants to do that. Entering data into a contract template. We we do stuff like when we now partner with contract AI providers too to to help with the the redlining or the third party contract issue, which is sort of a separate thing to to the contracts that you're craning off your own internal templates. So everywhere that we can, we're looking for we're looking for ways that, that would that we can basically help legal teams, pull themselves up out of out of the weeds and focus on that that high value work. I love that. And, yeah, just with with you talking about it and kind of, like, where LawVu fits and how Formstack is also able to just kind of come in from the document generation standpoint, you know, you all can be the the arms moving everything around kind of virtually and, kind of Formstack sits there as kind of that that document generation tool giving you something to hand back and forth. Love that story. And, yeah, Zach, I love how you've kind of been able to paint the picture of the before and after from the, TPCI standpoint. And so, you know, that's what we've done, you know, where we started, what we've done. And just to finish everything up, I would love to just kind of get both of your perspectives on what the future might look like. So, Zach, with you, just curious, does this project have a phase two now that you've been able to see, you know, some of these, automations, you know, automate your mundane? Are there now places that you're looking to kind of continue that momentum? Oh, definitely. And just I mentioned how our our business users found into or found LawVu to be very intuitive. On the way that we've, we one of the reasons we went with Formstack and wanted to kind of, bring that in is something that I I think a lot of customers and and this is a great thing that lobby does. They will kind of do some of the back end work with Formstack themselves. We saw that, you know, we we were able to hand things off and get it set up, but we we wondered, you know, if we if we took this in house, what's can we take it a step further without necessarily even though the support team is fantastic. There are twenty four seven live people you can talk to. But what if we wanted to do it ourselves? And I I personally had never used Formstack until, you know, I I saw what it was doing with the generation, and that was also very easy to pick up. It's pretty intuitive. You know, I with with like I said, with no prior experience, I was able to figure it out, and we have a, you know, another member of the team. And so when we talk about next steps, because it's so easy to use, one of the things that we're really interested in is a a more advanced application in terms of situationally, how can we present a certain flavor of a contract to to a user as opposed to we've done it a little bit with our our NDA where we we let people people are able to choose whether they want the unilateral or the neutral based on the the form that they put in. You're able to put conditional questions. We wanna we wanna take that and and do that on on the next level with some of our other agreements. So statements of work, for example. If it's a staffing statement of work as opposed to a statement of work that we're doing for one of the events that we run, what how much can we sort of prepopulate and take the the manual entry off of people to to Ali's point because nobody nobody loves doing that. K. So in the near term, we're we're really investing and leaning continuing to lean heavily into how we can use Lottie Informed Stack to to automate our contracting processes. And then longer term, we're really interested in looking at how, our data insights can even further empower us to to deliver world class legal support through operational efficiency. And so I think it's in data insights. I think it's in AI, and I think it's in integration between systems to to be able to talk to each other without necessarily having to to to jump around to find bits and pieces of information along the way. That's perfect. And, yeah, the the bringing back up how intuitive both products are, Ali and I can't thank you enough there. We we found that we found our promo line, pretty naturally. So appreciate that outlook. And, you know, Ali, wanna wanna give you the same opportunity here just as a a quick idea of maybe how LawVu is looking for, like, towards the future. You know, everybody's talking about AI at the moment. So wanted to give you also a chance to say, you know, how is LawVu helping companies take a look at that phase two of these projects? Yeah. You know, I would echo what Zach said. Those three key things, connectivity. For example, like, we we we connect with a number of different, other other software tools or or partners like Formstack seamlessly. Like, we connect seamlessly so they use the end user doesn't even need to see, and there's no manual data entry. So that connectivity, that's gonna enable the data to flow differently between systems across the business too. So, we connect to tools that help legal connect to procurement or legal connect to HR or, who else or finance. Right? So that just eliminating manual data entry. AI, you can't get through any webinar without mentioning AI. AI is gonna be huge, especially for legal, legal knowledge workers, and they work with a lot of information and written information. And so there's huge potential for AI to come in and to automate heaps of heaps of the real low value work. So we're heavily investing in AI, especially in the contract space too, because that's where it's really blowing up right now. And then data, data and insights is the third one. When when you start putting all of your legal work into one platform, you begin to generate a whole lot of data about how you're working, what you're working on. And you can use that to then make a business case. For example, we have a customer with a similar story to Zach's story, who implemented LawVu. They then started, they used Formstack to help with the contract creation and template. And then they pulled all the data out to show how long it was taking to review contracts, how quickly they were turning them around. They connected into Power Automate to do some more sort of calculations on the back end and connect both other data sources. And then they use that to make a case for getting an additional hire. So legal teams often have have no no data. They have no reporting. And as soon as they start to to get that data, they can actually make a case for why why they need support to help them, help them enable the business. I love that. Yeah. Data driven decisions. So, yeah, anytime that you can get somebody some more data and they can make those magical data driven decisions, everybody wins. And I wanna thank you both for, the time here to finish everything up. One of the things that should be popping up on everybody's screen who is watching is a poll. We would like to know, you know, if you wanna connect with Formstack and LawVu, please do let us know. Raise your hand. We'd love to talk about kind of, like, how we can bring these efficiencies, to other companies. I really appreciate you, Zach, from kind of, again, highlighting how this works in the real world and how Formstack and Law of You were able to help TPCI. And so thank you both so much for your time. We look forward to talking to anybody in the future around how we're able to help, and remember just the intuitiveness of both products. We're really able to come in, learn how everything's functioning, and meet you where you are. So whether you're in that phase one, phase two, or heck phase three, we'd be excited to talk to you and see how we'd be able to help kind of, again, bring those data driven decisions and bring those automation to just break apart those bottlenecks. So thank you all so much. Thank you very much, Zach. Thank you very much, Ali. Thanks, Jordan, and thanks, Zach. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Of course.